Illuminating opportunities for smart tourism innovation that foster sustainable tourist well-being using Q methodology

Abstract

Technology innovation has become one of the driving forces that advance the tourism industry, but the industry has yet to account for the manner in which personal technologies can foster tourists’ sustainable well-being. Generating innovation that promotes the sustainable well-being of individuals is deemed to be challenging because the experience needs to account for users’ psychological well-being and their attitudes towards technology. A holistic apprehension of these needs, which requires multidisciplinary perspectives, can help designers to identify design spaces for further design investigations at the fuzzy front-end of innovation. Hence, the goal of this study is to identify design opportunities for smart tourism innovation that foster sustainable tourist well-being by using Q methodology to gather participants’ attitudes on the future use of such technology. The study involved 43 participants ranking 46 statements derived from the extant literature. The results show four opinion clusters related to the optimal use of personal technologies for sustainable tourist well-being. These clusters, which highlight both hedonic and eudaimonic user experience considerations, provide directions for designers for developing innovations that promote well-being. Recommendations of using Q as an exploratory design research method are discussed.